The Russians understood that as well as the Japanese did. They'd fought like demons to keep the Kwantung Army from coming this far. Two engineers picked up a Russian corpse that lay on the tracks, one by the feet, the other by the arms. They tossed the body a couple of meters off to one side. The thump it made when it hit the dirt again sounded dreadfully final.
Fujita walked over to it. Russian boots were very fine-far more supple than Japanese issue. If this luckless fellow was anywhere close to his size… But the dead man wasn't. He was twenty centimeters taller than Fujita and twenty-five kilos heavier, and had feet to match his size. Large for a Russian, he would have made an enormous Japanese.
"Shigata ga nai," Fujita muttered-nothing to be done about it. But it wasn't as if this fellow were the only dead Russian close by. Oh, no. Fujita and his countrymen had plenty of corpses to strip.
And there were plenty of Japanese corpses to dispose of, too. The dead soldiers' souls would go to Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan would honor them for all eternity. That was a great deal… but somehow it didn't seem quite enough to Fujita right this minute. Maybe that was simple relief at coming through another fight unhurt. He hoped so. He wanted to give his fallen comrades all the respect they deserved.
But he didn't want to join them in death. And the Russians, even though pushed away from their precious railroad, hadn't given up. Artillery from back in the woods to the northeast started screaming in. Fujita stopped worrying about anyone else's boots and started worrying about getting blasted out of his. He jumped into the closest foxhole. A dead Russian already lay in there, crumpled like a broken doll. He rolled himself into a ball and hoped the shelling would let up soon.
It did, but then two or three Polikarpov biplane fighters strafed the Japanese at not much more than treetop height. They looked old-fashioned alongside the Japanese planes that fought them in the air, but they got the job done. One of the engineers who'd chucked the body off the tracks reeled away, clutching at his chest. He slumped to the muddy ground. Fujita feared he wouldn't get up again.
Japanese fighters showed up ten minutes after the Russians had zoomed away. Fujita watched them buzz around like angry bees looking for someone to sting. When they didn't find anybody, they flew away. "Bastards," he said. What were they good for if they came to the party late?
Sooner or later, the Reds would run out of gas for their planes and shells for their guns. That was the whole point to cutting the railroad. Sooner or later, yes, but not yet, dammit. Not yet.
Then Japanese bombers droned past, flying much higher than the fighters had. Fujita cocked his head, listening to the distant thunder of explosions from their bombs. Yes, those came from the general direction from which the Russian guns had been firing. Japanese flyers would presently claim they'd silenced those guns… till the artillery opened up again. Fujita was willing to admit the bomber pilots did try. He wasn't willing to admit anything more than that.
He needed to get rid of the dead Russian keeping company with him. The poor devil was just starting to stink, but that problem would get worse in a hurry. Grunting with effort, Fujita wrestled the body out of the hole.
He was about to drag it downwind when he noticed the dead man's boots. Damned if they weren't about his size. He wrestled one off the corpse and tried it on. It fit better than the boots his own country's quartermasters had given him. And the leather really was glove-flexible. He stripped off the Russian's other boot and put that on, too. As he walked around in the new pair, a broad smile spread across his face. He could kiss blisters good-bye!
The dead man didn't complain. He wasn't even wearing socks-just strips of cloth wrapped around his feet like puttees. Fujita had seen other Russians who did the same thing. They were welcome to the style, as far as he was concerned. His socks-tabis-were like mittens, with a separate space for his big toe on each foot. When the weather got warm, he could wear sandals with them. He wondered if the weather in Siberia ever got that warm. He wouldn't bet on it.
It was warm enough for mosquitoes right now. Siberian mosquitoes were numerous, savage, and large. A Japanese joke said one of them had landed at an airstrip, and groundcrew men pumped a hundred liters of gasoline into it before they realized what it was. Fujita thought it was a joke.
You didn't notice the bites when they happened. If you didn't feel the mosquito walking on your skin, or see it there, the damn thing would fly away happy. You'd feel it later, though-you'd itch for a week. Scratching only made things worse, too.
Back of the line, Japanese soldiers lit candles of camphor or citronella. You couldn't do it at the front. The scent, wafting on the wind, told the Russians where you were. They were like animals; they'd take clues a civilized man, a Japanese man, wouldn't even notice, and they'd use them to kill you.
An officer's whistle squealed like an angry shoat. "Advance!" Lieutenant Hanafusa shouted. "We have to push their guns away from the railroad line!"
Right now? Fujita wondered. A sergeant couldn't ask something like that out loud, not unless he wanted to get busted back to private-or, more likely, shot for cowardice. You'd disgrace your whole family if you did. Your father wouldn't be able to hold his head up at work. Your mother couldn't show her face at the vegetable market any more. Your little sister would never find a husband-or, maybe worse, she'd marry a latrine cleaner.
All that went through Fujita's head in less than a heartbeat. And so, instead of asking questions, he scrambled out of his hole, shouted, "My squad-advance!" and ran forward, clutching his rifle in hands whose palms were wet with fear-sweat.
Into the woods on the far side of the tracks. He wasn't alone. His squad-and the rest of the company-went in there with him. That made things a little easier. He didn't know whether misery loved company, but it needed company.
Were there Russians in the woods? Of course there were. There always were. Their damned machine guns started yammering right away. Cleverly hidden soldiers would let you run past, then shoot you in the back. They died after that, of course, but they didn't seem to care. They were so indifferent to death, Fujita wondered if they were human.
He got a flash of something moving, bounding away from the racket of combat as fast as it could. He started to bring his Arisaka up to his shoulder, then checked the motion, his jaw dropping in awe. "Damned if there aren't," he said softly.
"Aren't what, Sergeant?" asked a soldier at his elbow.
His cheeks heated; he hadn't meant to be overheard. "Tora," he answered. "That was a tiger over there." He pointed. "I've seen a tiger, a live tiger."
"You should have killed it," the other soldier said. "That'd be a hell of a souvenir. A tiger's skin? I hope so! I wish I'd seen it." He sounded jealous and wistful.
But Fujita shook his head. "It was too beautiful. I couldn't." He'd seen too much of war, here and in Mongolia. War was ugly, the ugliest thing there was. And war, he was certain, had nothing to do with tigers. "HELLO, PEGGY! How are you?" The receptionist at the U.S. embassy in Berlin greeted Peggy Druce with an all-American smile and a harsh Midwestern accent that would have set her teeth on edge back in the States but sounded heavenly here at the heart of the Third Reich.
"Hello, Lucinda. How's your daughter these days?" Peggy had been stuck in Berlin so long, she was on a first-name basis with everybody at the embassy and knew everybody's problems.
Lucinda's smile got wider. "She's much better, thanks. Those new pills, those waddayacallems, sulfas, fixed her up like magic-I just got a letter from her. And her husband finally has a job. He's riveting in an airplane factory that opened up a coupla miles from where they live."